Paper short abstract:

This paper is on a Japanese intellectual stream in 1980s and 1990s. I will mainly focus on three figures and their relationships: Miki Shigeo, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Nakamura Yūjirō. Through connecting them in a constellation, my paper will place them in a view of "organologic transcendentalism"

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about an alternative epistemological ground for humans through revisiting Japanese intellectual history in 1980s and 1990s. Some Japanese figures such as Miki Shigeo (anatomist; 1925~1987), Yoshimoto Takaaki (literature critic; 1924~2012), and Nakamura Yūjirō (philosopher; 1925~2017) among others showed idiosyncratic views on human beings based on their evolution. However, the intellectual tide and constellationthat they formed has less been studied down to the present.

First, Miki Shigeo offered his distinctive biological morphogenesis that humans evolved from the form of fish and human body potentially contains the memory of the gill respiration before evolutional advance to the land from the sea in the evolutional scale. He called this memory a “vital memory”. Second, Yohismoto Takaaki, who were influenced by Miki’s works, elaborated his view of an “African stage” as the alternative view of world history beyond Eurocentric universalism of history and the premodern staging of Asia in Hegelian and Marxist views. The “African phase” is the concept that explains the repetitive universality of “vital memory” in every historical society. Lastly, Nakamura Yūjirō, who were also influenced by Miki’s work and also Nishida Kitārō’s philosophy of “place of nothingness”, unfolded his philosophy of rhythm and cosmological philosophy. According to him, this planet fundamentally comprises the resonant phenomenon on the oscillating field in the sense of quantum physics, which is called rhythm, and Nakamura tried to reestablished philosophical issues such as consciousness, sociality, sublimity, and so on from this perspective.

In my paper, I will provide an integrative picture of these thinkers in a constellation as a post-humanist stream of "organologic transcendentalism", because they do not merely reduce humans to animals through their consideration on humans in terms of body and organs, but open them to the environment.